Don't Panic: Why Nerves Will Destroy Your Wealth

Manisha Thakor |44

Hometown: Columbus, IN

Alma Mater: Harvard M.B.A.; Wellesley College B.A.

Specialty: Indexing

Day Job: Director of Wealth Strategies for Women, Buckingham and The BAM Alliance

Cred: After 20 years managing money at firms like Fayez Sarofim, SG Warburg,  and Atalanta/Sosnoff Capital, Thakor started MoneyZen Wealth Management in 2012 to build portfolios of index funds for mass-affluent women. Rolled clients and their $50 million into to St. Louis asset manager Buckingham in January.

Worst Investment: Bank of America . Bought in 1997 for its dividend. Thanks to the financial crisis almost two decades later the stock is worth less than Thakor bought it for. “It highlighted for me both the company specific risk and lurking sector oriented black swans that comes with owning individual equities — even so called high quality blue chips ones.”

Pay It Forward Wisdom: Be patient. Billionaire money manager Fayez Sarofim taught her to only invest in things she was comfortable owning for a very very long time.  “Nervous energy is a great destroyer of wealth.”

Misplaced Assumption: Risk tolerance should be age-based. Most measures of appropriate portfolio risk are based on a crude calculation using your age and stomach for volatility. Thakor advises a more nuanced, goal focused approach. Consider your need to take risk. In other words, just because a strategy made you rich doesn’t mean you need to stick with it forever. “Early on in your life you take more risk. Once you’ve arrived at where you want to go you don’t need to take as much risk.”

Biggest Worry: When markets have a down period, desperate investors will turn active, abandoning passive indexing strategies.

Best Idea: Go small. Thakor is a believer in the Fama-French model which says small and value stocks tend in the long run to perform better than the market as a whole. Top pick: Bridgeway Omni Tax-Managed Small Cap Value Fund (BOTXS).